Boot Barn Finds If You Rebuild Site They Will Come

The morning after Western apparel marketer Boot Barn ran a series of post-Thanksgiving “door buster” sales on its Web site, director of e-commerce Dave Gusick visited his pick-and-pack operations center.

Upon entering the warehouse, Gusick saw boxes of orders piled up to the ceiling. The warehouse manager cornered Gusick and greeted him with “We have to talk.”

Three months earlier, this scene would not have happened. Three months earlier Boot Barn was relying on an antiquated Web site which didn’t support the promotional opportunities needed for growth, nor was it optimized for search engine marketing.

By Gusick’s calculation, Boot Barn’s online operations were the equivalent of between one and two times the level of an average store. They should have been between three and five times higher than that.

August was roughly when Gusick joined Boot Barn. It was also one month before the soft launch of its new Web site, which was now being supported by Demandware Commerce.

The change was more of a necessity than a luxury. According to Gusick, the previous system had “lots of Achilles’ heels”, including the inability to scale up to higher volumes of order processing. What promotions did support were limited to basic discounts, or gift-with-purchase orders—and an outside vendor had to make the changes on the site.

The site’s lack of nimbleness was costing it sales. “Our competitors run all kinds of promotions,” says Gusick. “We have to do site changes every week to keep [offers] fresh.” Previously, changes needed up to a month to effect.

Similarly, the old site’s internal search functions were very broad, and left a lot to be desired—like relevant results. The Demandware site enables detailed search criteria, allowing visitors to see desired items with a click or two.

Boot Barn’s online store typically lists between 30,000 and 40,000 products. As part of the relaunch, retail associates were brought in to assign attributes for every piece of merchandise.

This tagging effort helped ameliorate a falloff in business when the new site went live. Site switchovers can often result in a five to 20% drop in both traffic and sales, according to Gusick.

“You tend not to have all the links updated,” Gusick says, referencing off-site referral links. “Pay-per-click and search engine marketing campaigns have to change and be upgraded. You tend to lose some traffic coming to the site.”

Boot Barn’s site traffic did, in fact, drop somewhere between 10% and 15% during last September when the new site first went live. “But that drop is not due to Demandware,” he hastens to add. If anything, the effort the company put into tagging merchandise, combined with Demandware’s structure, improved the site’s visibility.

“Google crawled the new site and maintained our high organic search results post-launch,” Gusick says. “We did see a dip in traffic from affiliate programs.”

By October, the site’s sales had returned to pre-conversion levels. At that point, Gusick was ready to test product promotions and discounts.

One of his first efforts was revamping Boot Barn’s pay-per-click activities. At the time of the relaunch, it had been maintaining between 20,000 and 30,000 keywords, many of which were underperforming legacy terms.

“Paid search was contributing only 10% of site traffic,” Guisick says. “We gutted all the old campaigns and built up a whole set of new ones with properly chosen keywords and newer ads.” Paid search traffic jumped from 10% to nearly 30%, and sales conversions rose in similar fashion.

Tweaks to the site’s back-end operations generated benefits as well. The shopping cart system was overhauled, with one major change being the presentation of shipping costs right up front. Previously, site visitors would not know what these costs would be until the end of the checkout process. “Our cart abandonment rates went down by 10%-15%,” Gusick says.

The post-Thanksgiving door buster promotions were the final proof of the new system’s efficacy. Through e-mail and onsite notifications, Boot Barn promoted discounts to the first 100 customers making specific purchases.

On Cyber Monday—the first Monday after Thanksgiving – the site generated three times its average volume. In addition to the panicked reaction from the company’s own warehouse manager, one of its drop-ship suppliers, Ariat, called the order department and asked for order volume confirmation. Ariat was convinced the day’s orders had been duplicated.

“It wasn’t. That was the number of orders,” Gusick says.

Sales levels for Boot Barn’s online operations are between 25%-40% higher than before its site conversion. Gusick plans to increase the amount of segmentation testing during 2011, taking advantage of dynamic targeting features to promote specific offers to different customer segments.